Re-Bar moved into the gritty little space at Howell and Boren in January of 1990, spearheaded by Steve Wells and Patrick “Pit” Kwiecinski. Well, except for the Harley.Ĭreating a space where everyone was confused if it was a gay bar, theater space, dance club, punk venue, goth bar, or whatever really just made all the misfits come together and look out for it like a family treasure. As a stage, the space is too long and narrow, but since the play is set on a Manhattan street circa 1969, the runway effect works OK.” Seattle Times critic Tim Apello wrote, “ made his auspicious Seattle directing debut last night at Sparks, a bar that sports a Harley dangling by chains from the ceiling. Where its predecessors had mostly hosted cabaret, Sparks added full-length stageplays to the mix, such as a 1986 run of gay activist and playwright Doric Wilson’s Street Theatre.
Next, the building became Sparks Tavern, sometimes known as S, another gay and lesbian bar. It was owned by Alex Herbin, aka Axel, and his partner Rick, aka Rocky-but they both got sick during the AIDS crisis of the early 1980s and Herbin passed away quickly, causing the club to shut down. Until 1983, the building was dance club Axel Rock. For a brief period around 19, it was Thirsty’s Tavern, which also hosted cabaret acts. When the building that housed Pete’s was torn down, the new structure built in its place became the Night Hawk Tavern, often spelled as “the Nite Hawk” in old Seattle newspapers, and eventually started booking cabaret acts and gay entertainment in general. “Police arrived to find nursing a cut foot. “The peace of Howell Street was broken,” reads the Times piece. In another Times crime report, this one from May 26, 1930, a man saw his staggering reflection in a plate-glass window of the building, and, annoyed by what he perceived to be another intoxicated person, kicked the window in. But he saw the stranger getting in a machine with two or three other fellows, and the desire to investigate faded.” He felt more like getting to the bottom of the thing then, he said. One, from June 17, 1928, recalls a time a Peter Comas, a cook at Pete’s, talked his way through an interaction with a burglar targeting Skagg’s Market next door, ultimately abandoning any delusions of being a hero: “Comas then bowed himself away from the stranger, and whistling cheerily to disguise his intent, returned to the coffee shop and procured a knife. The Times also recounts two early instances of debauchery at this address. In 1910, visiting French civil engineer Francois Duval died in his chair and was found by his landlady, Mrs. Costello had a daughter while living at this address. Vidal) was trying to sell resurrection plants for 15 cents. Vidal, “a man with family in great need,” posted several desperate ads in the Seattle Times (then the Seattle Daily Times) looking for work with 1114 Howell as his listed address. Sitting at the foot of Capitol Hill, just a hair into the Cascade neighborhood, it’s a rectangular, reinforced-masonry structure-that probably does, appropriately, contain rebar-and has always been a bar or restaurant, replacing Pete’s Coffee Shop, an unassuming lunch counter that stood at Boren and Howell in the 1920s.Ī boarding house also used to occupy this spot. It was built in 1930, so certainly, it’s old, but it’s single-story and not constructed particularly interestingly or well.
The building itself, located at 1114 Howell, is sort of an anomaly in that’s it’s historic in a way, not.
In addition to being the venue Nirvana picked for their Nevermind release party-wherein the band got kicked out of their own show after sneaking a handle of Jack Daniel’s and then starting a cake fight-Re-Bar is home to the longest-running weekly house nights on the West Coast: the two-and-a-half-decade-old Seattle Poetry Slam, the birthplace of drag comedienne Dina Martina, as well as a safe space for generations of LGBTQ+ performers and patrons alike. Re-Bar certainly one of the city’s most historic extant nightclubs.